A Methodological Approach to User Evaluation and Assessment of a Virtual Environment Hangout

Innovation in virtual reality and motion sensing devices is pushing the development of virtual communication platforms towards completely immersive scenarios, which require full user interaction and create complex sensory experiences. This evolution influences user experiences and creates new paradigms for interaction, leading to an increased importance of user evaluation and assessment on new systems interfaces and usability, to validate platform design and development from the users’ point of view. The REVERIE research project aims to develop a virtual environment service for realistic inter-personal interaction. This paper describes the design challenges faced during the development process of user interfaces and the adopted methodological approach to user evaluation and assessment

Mobile Electronic Memos

Abstract. This paper explores a novel concept called Mobile Electronic Memo whose purpose is to overcome the limitations in terms of interoperability and accessibility imposed by the current technology. To achieve this goal, Mobile Electronic Memos decouple the semantics of the information from the physical and pragmatic constraints of the medium that transports it. We examine related works and standards that could be good candidates for implementing MEMs and describe a prototype implementation that has been realized as a proof of concept

Objective and subjective quality assessment of geometry compression of reconstructed 3D Humans in a 3D virtual room

Compression of 3D object based video is relevant for 3D Immersive applications. Nevertheless, the perceptual aspects of the degradation introduced by codecs for meshes and point clouds are not well understood. In this paper we evaluate the subjective and objective degradations introduced by such codecs in a state of art 3D immersive virtual room. In the 3D immersive virtual room, users are captured with multiple cameras, and their surfaces are reconstructed as photorealistic colored/textured 3D meshes or point clouds. To test the perceptual effect of compression and transmission, we render degraded versions with different frame rates in different contexts (near/far) in the scene. A quantitative subjective study with 16 users shows that negligible distortion of decoded surfaces compared to the original reconstructions can be achieved in the 3D virtual room. In addition, a qualitative task based analysis in a full prototype field trial shows increased presence, emotion, user and state recognition of the reconstructed 3D Human representation compared to animated computer avatars

Network Support for Social 3-D Immersive Tele-Presence with Highly Realistic Natural and Synthetic Avatar Users

The next generation in 3D tele-presence is based on modular systems that combine live captured object based 3D video and synthetically authored 3D graphics content. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a network solution for multi-party real-time communication of these types of content. This prototype includes a UDP/TCP multi-streaming kernel that includes media synchronization support, packet scheduling, loss resilient real-time transmission and an easy to use blocking and non-blocking API. To compress the live reconstructed 3D data streams that represent the natural user, two categories of 3D mesh codecs were integrated: a highly adaptive real-time geometry driven mesh codec and a fast single rate codec that provides better performance at high resolutions. Subjective tests with 16 subjects indicate that only modest perceptual degradation of the highly realistic 3D natural user is introduced, especially when the users in the virtual world are at a distance. We developed a session management protocol for setting up streams based on the specific 3DTI capabilities allowing device scalability from light (render only) to heavy clients (rendering and 3D Capturing). Additionally, a distributed messaging system via web-sockets and cloud infrastructures based on publish and subscribe was integrated for real-time delivery of avatar and other AI data

Exploring influencing factors of technology use for active and healthy ageing support in older adults

Aim of this study is to investigate the influence of technological and social cognitive factors for the use of sensor-based technologies for active and healthy ageing (AHA) support by older adults. In a mixed methods approach, data was initially obtained from an online questionnaire completed by older health technology users and used in a regression analysis, where factors from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) served as predictors for health technology use (HTU). Further, in-depth interviews were conducted with older adults to gain insights into technology use and physical activity behaviour of older adults. The regression analysis showed that the TAM and SCT factors accounted for a significant proportion of variance (39.5%) in HTU. Significant predictors of HTU were physical activity (.399**), social support (.287*), and expectations regarding individual health (.440*) and physical appearance (−.470**), indicating physical activity as mediator for HTU. The qualitative analysis indicated the conflation of technology support with social environments as key for physical activity behaviour in older adults. The findings indicate physical activity as a mediator in HTU by older adults and suggest that the consideration of social factors in health technology design may facilitate the uptake of AHA technologies